


blood proofs

by Keturagh



Series: False Fruit [15]
Category: Dragon Age (Video Games), Dragon Age - All Media Types, Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: Arguing, Elves, F/M, Fluff and Angst
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-28
Updated: 2019-12-28
Packaged: 2021-02-26 04:28:46
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,932
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21997528
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Keturagh/pseuds/Keturagh
Summary: As their voices raised in the atrium — his cynical, bitter and cruel, and hers vicious and imperious, threaded with poison, Pangara found herself wishing, however begrudgingly, that she had left both of them behind.
Relationships: Female Inquisitor/Solas (Dragon Age), Female Lavellan/Solas, Fen'Harel | Solas/Female Lavellan, Inquisitor/Solas (Dragon Age)
Series: False Fruit [15]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1579504
Kudos: 25





	blood proofs

**“my blood approves,/and kisses are a better fate/than wisdom” (VII e.e. cummings)**

\--

Vivienne had made it clear, in a number of different ways, why the _apostate_ should be left at Skyhold.

And as their voices raised in the atrium — his cynical, bitter and cruel, and hers vicious and imperious, threaded with poison, Pangara found herself wishing, however begrudgingly, that she had left both of them behind.

Not because Solas did not have the right to be here. And Vivienne’s thoughts on the artifact could be crucial.

But the two mages could not be reconciled to one another’s presence.

Traveling to the Orlesian museum had been increasingly trying. Now that they were here and had the opportunity to review the artifact, this bickering was, frankly, a waste of everyone’s fucking time.

Pangara’s grip tightened on her staff. Her reflexive method of snapping an argument to a close with a flare of magic would never work in this company. She had realized early on in their journeys together that she would need to be able to out-speak them. She would have to out-debate them before they could start to mount a defense, and position her arguments to win in the first volley, before they could rally and silence her: Vivienne with polite affection, Solas with distant irritation.

At the moment, Dorian was the only member of their party preserving the Inquisition’s face in front of the scholars who had been studying the artifact. The few nobles scattered about seemed most thrilled to see Vivienne getting a rise out of the Inquisition’s apostate. The scholars, on the other hand, were a confused cluster of red-masked men and women, all too nervous to speak directly to a mage from Tevinter. They shifted their feet and tried to point out features of the artifact that Dorian had already noted and dismissed as irrelevant.

The consultation of the Inquisition’s mages had been an unprecedented extension of trust from Orlais following the success at Halamshiral. They had more or less beseeched, "please do not destroy too many old pots with your army," but also Josephine thought it was likely that the museum wanted to form some sort of benefactor's alliance with the Inquisition. The museum had requested this conference of the most highly-positioned magic-users in Ferelden and Orlais to explore the nature of an artifact recently unearthed in the Arbor Wilds.

When they'd been brought into the room that housed this newest acquisition, the Inquisitor, the _Herald of Andraste_ , had been brought forward first. Pangara had given half a glance to the great round thing, seen it was decidedly neither Dalish nor affected in the slightest by her mark, and had shrugged at the assembled company.

“I defer to the experts,” she'd said.

A mistake.

“I only care to point out, my dear, that it is not remarkable. Not considering your predisposition to see every discipline of magic as deriving from the conscious manipulation of dreams and the demons that lurk within. Naturally, you incorrectly perceive a connection here, where it is clearly most inappropriate.”

“Ah, yes. The Fade is of no consequence to one who fiddles with the primordial energies like a child copying words from rote. Enchanter, there is nothing in magic that is not dream.”

“A response I would expect from one who has so narrowly focused his learning on the subject. Scoff, yet you would be disgraced by the ingenuity at the most limited of salons. Tell me, in your isolation, how often did spirits challenge your preconceptions about the nature of magic and the Fade?”

“More often than you would care to admit or come to know —”

Pangara pinched the bridge of her nose and looked back to Dorian. He was elbows-deep in the device with two scholars fluttering nervously on either side of where he knelt. It seemed like they were imploring him to be careful.

Dorian saw her look and only shrugged, rolled his eyes, and made a gesture within the device that both caused its core to glow vibrantly green and alarmed the scholars no end.

Pangara looked around at the growing crowd. Solas and Vivienne, increasingly haughty and posturing, either did not notice human nobles edging closer to their show. Or, perhaps, they felt bolder with the audience.

Josephine… would not like this. Not one bit.

“Remarkable,” she heard a nasally voice carry to her under another of Solas' biting remarks, and Vivienne's answering laugh. “A knife-ear so _passionate_ about something he clearly knows _nothing_ about. Ripe for abomination, seems to me! A wonder he's not yet been slaughtered by demons. Or at least put down for all our sakes!”

Appreciative chortles blossomed up around this idea, that the _knife-ear_ should be _slaughtered_ , and Pangara snapped, felt her vision go dark, and she choked as she jerked forward, hard footfalls bringing her to Solas, the Anchor spitting.

He was mid-sentence; she took his hand, blood in her ears and her eyes fixed on the floor. She walked past him, wrenching at his arm when he resisted. She had no words to speak past the lump of impotent, enraged loathing in her throat. He wasn't moving. She pulled him, again, and then finally looked back and let him see all of her hurt. His stubborn snarl faded to vague guilt; he swallowed whatever argument he’d so urgently needed to fling at Vivienne next, and he followed her.

She couldn't even look at Vivienne as she wrenched him away.

“Do you know what the artifact is?” she asked him bluntly. They’d woven through side rooms of masks, spears, and suits of armor and found a hall that was quiet and untraveled, the walls devoted to what appeared to be paintings of soldiers tending their wounded along the Chantry’s Exalted Marches.

Solas made a frustrated noise, releasing himself from her grasp. He adjusted the cuffs of his sleeves. “I can postulate," he started, "based on similar findings in the Fade —”

“So no. No you don’t.” She spoke over him, spreading her hands side to side. “You don’t _know._ You don’t know what it is or what it does. That’s it. You can _guess,_ but you don’t know.”

His lip curled and his hands clenched and twitched and he struggled, obviously, to keep from saying something that even he, incensed and at least partially humiliated, knew was too cruel to say to her.

She appreciated his restraint, but was equal parts furious. With him. With Vivienne. With herself… for not laying that Orlesian out in the cinders of his own skin.  


“The last thing I need is for you... When we’re only _here_ for one damned thing — " she failed to speak, her hands empty. She hated all Orlais and she was unbalanced and hadn’t formed an argument that would bring him to her side. She hadn’t realized how deeply the nobleman’s words had sunk into her. She felt scared, even though she knew both of them could fight their way out of a mob if they needed to. She felt protective. And helpless. Adrenaline made her shaky. Having nowhere to go, the fight inside of her pricked her eyes with tears. _This is not what I wanted_ , she thought, as she turned away from him and demanded her eyes to dry.

He was strangely silent behind her. She wondered, for a moment, if he’d gone.

“I heard it too,” he said, softly.

She suddenly did not want to talk about this. Wanted to not have to talk about this ever again.

“Can we just focus, so we can leave?" She tried to make her tone lighter, tried to put on the easygoing mask again. It wouldn't fit. "If you’d just _try_ and work with Vivienne…” He stood behind her, patient. “And," she added, hard, all her frustration coming through, "you can’t speak that way to her in front of her people. She has to save face. She has to play their Game, she has to defend herself.” 

Solas came and folded his hands behind his back beside her. Then he reached out, and placed a hand, steady, on her shoulder.

She looked up at him.

“I know," he admitted gently. "You are right. It does our cause no favors to bicker in the open.”

She knew he did not speak of the Inquisition.

They were both quiet.

“Don’t make me scared for you,” she asked.

“I cannot promise that,” he answered. She looked up at him, numb, and she had always known that this was true. Even if he were silent and meek among the shems, still, the abuses and the threats — however veiled — would never truly cease. He was a man who stood so strong, and so tall, dignified and certain. It made him a bigger, better target.

Still, she’d asked as she’d asked her father, her uncle, and her mother when the rare opportunity for barter had opened up with a shemlen homestead. “Don’t give me any reasons to worry,” she'd say, reflexive, watching them leave. An easy thing to say, even after she’d gotten old enough to realize the futility of it. She knew there wasn’t anything she or her family could do, no behavior or change of mood, that would protect them from the shems.

But part of her still thought that if she didn’t at least ask, warn them, and plead with them to be safe - then whatever happened would be, somehow, her fault.

“Try and be safer,” she amended.

After a moment’s hesitation, where she watched something strange pass behind his eyes, he nodded. “I can try.”

She wanted, when she drew up against him, when she wrapped her arms around him, when she buried her face against the fur across his chest, to have a spirit that was calm. She wanted to be able to make peaceful the still-shaking fears and rages that conjured a thousand stories of retribution and public humiliation in her mind.

She wanted to not have to think about this anymore. To just have him, _him_. Without this constant crowd of watchful shemlen, friend and foe alike. It was too much. His arms wrapped around her, pulled her close and tight.

“Ir abelas,” he murmured, voice low. For only her.

He pulled away at the sound of passing Orlesians, nobles chattering behind masks.

He looked down at her. She reached up and touched his lip. He seemed surprised, at first, but then she stepped forward and brought her lips up, hovering close to his, and she felt his body shift to face and accept her, wanting, not meaning to show how much he welcomed this.

"Pangara, I..."

She kissed him. He moved and drew her closer, as if holding her were sacred, responding immediately and intensely.

Dorian's call for both of them was shouted nervously back from the direction of the atrium.

Solas' face hovered over hers, one moment longer. His breath moved on her skin. His blue eyes read into hers, wintry and fine, the threading of his irises woven with purplish grey. Then he closed his eyes, drew back. “Perhaps Dorian has unlocked the secret of the thing,” he said roughly.

“Perhaps," she allowed. She smiled, squeezing his hand. "And Dorian and Vivienne, working _together_ , could use their Fade expert to figure out who made the thing. Then you can all receive the praises of the shems and we can _go_.”

He conceded with a rueful half-smile, and he held her hand as they jogged back towards the sounds of confused shouting, through all the galleries of things the shems studied, past all the human things they sheltered.


End file.
